Disclaimer; If you’ll all humor me for a moment while I expound on a bit of a conspiracy theory. I don’t have the evidence necessary to claim anything with surety. Plus poor wording, hyperbole, and general ignorance on the matter may make parts of this thesis easy to refute.
With that said. I believe almost all cases of variegation in cannabis is the result of a virus, that can stowaway inside of seeds produced while the mother is infected. I think the variegation we’ve been seeing here is, too, but the problem with that theory is the only symptom I’ve seen is the variegation. Yields are unaffected, trichome density unaffected, essential oil and cannabinoid production unaffected, on 100% of the plants I’ve seen this variegation on.
So if the variegation is the only symptom, why do I think it’s a virus?
I’ve seen it jump. This is two pictures of the same bud on a chocolate rain — right now — with no obvious maladies, and a normal amount of trichomes on a leaf that’s showing the same mottling.
Hell, I think she might be frostier than the first time I ran this cut.
So if it doesn’t seem to be a problem; why am I stressing it? If you’re familiar with Tulip Breaking Virus, it produced the most valuable tulips of all time.
Their desirability helped the virus spread. Knowing about the tulips might be biasing my perspective, tho. Like a first-year psychology student pathologizing all the people they talk to.
Personally. The variegation worries me. I looked into papers on the sanitization of mosaic viruses and found a product called zerotol had successfully worked at inhibiting the spread, and bonus points, they have a cannabis specific version comprised of 5.3% h2o2 and 1.3% peracetic acid. Take it a step further and it’s 6% h2o2 and .6% acetic acid.
So in a liter jar, put;
120ml plain old 5% vinegar.
880ml plain old 3% hydrogen peroxide.
For sanitizing tools; dilute 10x (100ml / liter)
For curative IPM; dilute 30x (30ml / liter)
For preventative IPM; dilute 40x (20-25ml / liter)
But at the end of the day. I genuinely don’t know if it’s all in my head. @Upstate especially has such a clean beautiful leaf, that I want to believe it’s a natural variegation. It’s easy to think badly about a less than perfect leaf showing a variegation, but that one is immaculate.